Why incomplete subscript/superscript alphabet ?

[Christoph Päper]

Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela at cs.tut.fi>:
> 
> … the solution is to use just “3ème”, perhaps with some method (“above” the character level) used to format the letters as superscript, when not limited to plain text …

For ordinal numbers, it’s relatively simple to code language-dependent glyph substitution in Opentype which would not require any additional effort from the author, “3ème” would just work, “3e” → “3ᵉ” would require some extra care to avoid false positives. Letter-only abbreviations, however, would only work reliably with an added marker. Many languages conventionally, which are written in the roman script, including English, choose an apostrophe, but inter-letter periods are also not unheard of. That means, “M’me” and “M.me” could also be easily converted to “Mᵐᵉ” on a font/glyph level. If the used OTF feature is supported and active, this will work in plain text environments, but, of course, it depends on the font.